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A new French website allows children to pay older students to do their homework for them. Faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) allows children to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes costs 80 euros ($100). Founder Stephane Boukris says, "I realized there was a gap in the market. Add to that a dose of insolence, a zest of arrogance and the internet, and you have faismesdevoirs.com." I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.

To some extent, the problem is that schools are designed to churn out factory workers. They teach people to do as they're told, follow directions, and performance at completing menial tasks is the primary measure of virtue. It's no coincidence that our current school systems have their roots in the industrial revolution.

So the US is now a country of people who have a factory-worker mentality and generally approach problems the way a factory worker would, but we aren't factory workers. The factories have

The "arbitrary system" is simply to encourage you to learn the material. If you cheat it by not learning it then you are only cheating yourself and come the exam, where this type of cheating will not work, you will have a very nasty surprise.

They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.

I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.

This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.

Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.

To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.

So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.

but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor.

Sorry but this is a fault of the person writing the exam but the technique. I teach physics at University and physics is a subject where memorizing facts can only get you so far. For most of the questions in my exams you have to be able to apply the techniques from the lectures to new and different situations. I let the students write their own formula sheet so they do not have to memorize too much but it is a big mistake to think that you can get by without learning anything - reference books are only use

The "system" is flawed in grading as well, it's very often possible for teachers to take someone a whole letter grade down purely for personal reasons (in florida it's often called "lifeskills points") and the entire system is extroardinarily F-weighted.

It's very easy to simply get unlucky in which questions are on a given test and by that ONE grade be mathematically eliminated from ever getting much higher than a middleground C whether or not you get all C's for the rest of the year or all A's.

I know lots of people who are very dedicated to getting straight A's. Every single one of them takes the time--because they want the grade--NOT because they give a shit about the stuff they're learning.

You are confusing motivation with learning. This is a problem with the North American system - it is so broad that a lot of the time students are taking subject they could not care two figs about - for example I could not stand English it did not matter how good the teacher was I literally hated the subject. In the UK we used to have an excellent system which allowed you to specialize early on. This worked great for me but some people hated it because it made them choose early on when they did not know wha

Schools are not run based on scientific principles, they don't take into account the students interest or student feedback

There is no proven scientific principle of school running. There have been several suggestions, psychoanalysis of students/teachers, reward systems, etc., but the state of schooling doesn't seem to show any dramatic change.

One thing I can say for sure is that level of comprehension among students who are actually interested in the subjects has gotten much better because of the availability of simulation demos. I'd have understood conics much better in school if I had easy access to graphing programs (back i

This is true. Which is why a lot of universities prefer to do their assessment on the fly. I'm not exactly sure how one might apply this to anything other than a science course (IANA teacher) but a system whereby a supervisor can stroll around and see how the student has been able to apply what he has learned seems to work. If a student has an empty worksheet, then he clearly hasn't understood something, and needs to do more work.

Stop pretending that everyone is "gifted" or "honors" and let the precious snowflakes that get it after the third go move on in advanced classes while the ones that actually need to bang their head against 50 problems stay behind.

In other words don't punish excellence with forced mediocrity. Throw in some ethics as a preventative measure and if they get cocky and act too superior anyway they'll get taken down a notch when they hit something they can't do.

One of my schools had it, but then they started mixing all of the classes back together. The problem is that if you let them most of these kids will easily outpace the entirety of the schools curriculum and the whole point of school isn't imparting knowledge, it's keeping the kids busy all day.

I think the point was that those on the far ends of the curve have different needs and they should be considered too. Yes, it's a difficult problem, but it's not an unsolvable one. I think many here would at least cut them some slack if there were any signs of movement on that.

It is unreasonable to expect everyone to keep up with the fastest runner, but it's also unreasonable to force the fastest to slow down to match the slowest. The only solution I can think of right this second is to separate the classes

It's totally the other way around. A French man or woman in the US is treated well. A US citizen in France has _always_ been an object of ridicule unless they were born in France and speak perfect French.

Then change the teaching methods. Kids don't want to learn because they find that certain subject boring, or the way it's teached is boring. so they cheat. My teachers and system, weren't interested in all that. It's easier to give an F, so I was forced to cheat.

The current system, it appears to me, is designed for punishing. You didn't learn ? Ok, here's F and you think about this. System of reward and punishment. But that doesn't work very well, so when we

I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care. The worst offenders were the ones who's parents paid them for receiving a good grade. At that point, they focused on the grade instead of learning.

I think we need to throw all the standardized tests out the window and start teaching kids how to learn and not how to pass a test.

I had this problem until high school, then I had all of my teachers give me an extra copy of the assignment that I could do at home while screwing around in class and writing bullshit that was 100% wrong on my assignments but sounded good, so I could laugh and watch the copiers fail until they'd get the Hell away.

That is the point. They didn't care, because they where kids, their interests where in other stuff.They don't "understand" the consequences of not learning, but it's not theirs fault.

If you did learn, and many of slashdotters probably did learn, ok.. good for you. But it's not justifed to blame kids who don't, because they find the subject boring. In fact, those who find some subject boring, they will probably not be good at it, even if they learned it.I give a rats ass for history today, I know the basics

None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care.

What's the difference? If the material interested them rather than boring them, then they'd care. If they cared, they wouldn't be lazy.

Teaching is really simple: If the students are interested then they'll learn. If they aren't, they won't. Some teaching methods will increase student interest, others will decrease it. Making moral judgments about the student's dedication or whatever is a pointless waste of time.

What's the difference? If the material interested them rather than boring them, then they'd care. If they cared, they wouldn't be lazy.

That's pretty nonsensical. Things that are fascinating to one person are boring to another. If you're trying to teach classical music, and the students are only interested in monster trucks, then how do you make it interesting?

Even for students who are interested in a particular area of study, there are always boring and difficult parts. There's no way around that. Students just have to deal with it. Education is the goal, not entertainment. How are they going to cope with the real world if they expect ever

Not really you know. Unemployment benefits are cut after 12 months in France as opposed to 6 months in the USA, not that much of a difference. Anyway with the Great Crisis upon us unemployment is over 8% in the US, we are all going to be chomeurs sans benefits.

I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care.

There's a very fine line between "bored" and "lazy and didn't care". If I'm not doing something because the activity bores me, then clearly I don't want to work on it because I don't care much about it.

I have an aversion to the word "lazy" because I'm not sure what it's trying describe. It seems to me to imply that there are people who won't do work because they simply won't, as though there are no further reasons behind it. That doesn't accurately describe anyone I know.

Most of the time that I've dealt with people who are averse to work, there are really a number of factors at play. For one thing, if I refuse to do the work you want me to, it's possible that I just don't think that work is valuable, and it's even possible that I'm right about that. It may also be that I don't really know how to do that work, or I don't know where to begin, and rather than admitting it, I just put it off.

Beyond that, lots of people that I know who are "lazy" in general are also just very discouraged from working. Often they're coming from a place where they believe that nothing they do will be accepted by others to be "good enough". If you're feeling like you have no possibility of success and achievement, then there doesn't seem to be much point in trying.

I know I probably sound like a politically correct hippy who's just making excuses, but I just think there's something dangerous in labeling children as "lazy". It's saying, "You're not just disinterested or discouraged, but there's actually a serious flaw with you, personally, that makes you unworthy of success." If being discouraged is actually part of the problem, then calling them "lazy" may be very counter-productive in getting them to work on things.

Lets use another judgement, sweet, to illustrate. What is sweet (as in sugar is sweet)?

Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet. Worse, depending on what I been eating before, my mental and physical state, I may experience sweetness in a different way. So wether something is sweet or not is not an absolute. Yes as a society we must be able to label things as either sweet or not sweet based on general consent that

Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.

I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.

Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.

This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".

I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.

If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.

Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.

School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.

I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.

At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.

At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?

Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video [fora.tv] that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.

But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:

I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work: -understood the importance of a task
- believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task
- knew which task needed to be complete and how to do it
- felt confident in his/her own ability to complete that task

I think those are covered under "believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task".

Besides, there are people who "know that if they don't do it, they won't get paid," and yet still don't work, but it's usually because they don't believe that working will actually benefit them very much either. There are people who "know that if they don't do it, they don't eat," and they'll do some kind of 'work', but not necessarily the kind you want them to. They might end up begging for spare change on the

I'll tell you what laziness is. It's a neurochemical state. Having recently come under the effects of some unknown affliction, I've had ample opportunity experience the varying mental states it causes and to try out a slew of different drugs that affect the levels of various neurotransmitters. My capacity and ability to do things varies markedly, depending on how bad the affliction is and how the drugs are working. For example, under a certain neural mix, I get tremendous satisfaction from taking care of th

That's a good point, but drugs aren't the only things that can cause a change in neurological state. In my experience, people who feel isolated, rejected, depressed, and --what's the opposite of empowered?-- are less likely to want to feel motivated to work. I bet some of those feelings have corresponding neurological states.

There are plenty of questions here, in terms of what the ultimate cause is of these feelings and the physical state of the brain, how much positive/negative enforcement of behavior i

Sleep 4 to 5 hours, skip breakfast, carry 2/3rds of your weight half a mile, listen to a lecture and then write by hand a 5 paragraph essay, carry that weight another half mile, repeat, carry that weight another half mile, repeat, carry it another half mile, this time to 50 advanced chemistry problems without ANY type of calculator OR slide rule OR lookup table for square roots, go another half mile to stand in line for 25 minutes of your half hour lunch break and pay $3 eat 1 ~4 inch long slice of pizza a

Cheating is just an excuse to not work hard. If you can demonstrate serious effort and still have trouble, try finding a teacher/professor during office hours.

Although I agree with you that cheating is unacceptable (and deserving of a zero), it is a symptom of the system. You say it's an excuse to not work hard, and you want serious effort being demonstrated. Well, working hard and amount of effort should be completely irrelevant. Results are what matter. That's true in the "real world" and it should be true in the schools.

Some people will learn effortlessly. Others will require more work. Yet, some teachers (not necessarily you) insist on giving large amounts of busy work, just to make sure that the students have hours of work after school to accomplish, on the hopes that the ones who are having difficulty learning will eventually do so by repetition.

Problem #1: Even the ones who do eventually learn through the busy-work repetition are not actually "learning." They'll be able to follow the example to solve that types of problems given them, but they'll have no idea how to apply the concepts to solve problems they haven't seen before.

Problem #2: The ones who learn quickly end up wasting their time on tons of problems they already know how to work.

Problem #3: There are people on both categories who will simply be frustrated with the amount of work, and just not do it. They'll either take the bad grade or cheat. Not saying that's a justification to the cheating, here. Personally, I just used to calculate exactly how much homework I could get away with not doing to get the grade I wanted in the class rather than cheat. I'm not a genius either, but homework really was given in extremely large amounts to compensate for the people who were really having trouble with the classes.

Ideally, this is what you do: you assign homework, but don't grade it. Assign lots of problems but let your students decide how much they need to work on. You can have them turn it in and correct the problems they did work on (without assigning a grade, so they don't have to turn in everything...this will keep your workload lighter too) so that they get confirmation that what they think they are doing correctly actually is correct.

You keep your classes discussion oriented. Make sure students are involved when you ask them about the concepts, not the problems.

You give them tests for the evaluation of their knowledge, which is the only thing that should matter. Part of the test is like the problems they've worked on for homework, but at least half the test are problems they've never seen before, but have the knowledge to figure out. This ensures you are testing their knowledge, not their ability to memorize a process to solve a particular type of problem.

There. Now if somebody fails the test because they didn't do any of the optional homework, it's their own damn fault for not wishing to work hard. However, you're no longer trying to punish people who don't wish to work harder then they have to.

It's the only way to cram a bunch of facts in your head so you can start talking about how they all connect. Learning is not just rote memorization, but it is a necessary element to the next step: anything you have memorized you can recall instantly

You're not supposed to memorize facts before understanding how they connect. Think of it like the multiplication table. You don't memorize it before you know what it is. You learn what it means, you understand the concept. Then you use it. When you're learning it, you won't have instant recall, but for anything you don't remember, you'll be able to count to get the answer. After you do that enough times, you'll have it memorized, without having to sit there trying to memorize it.

The system is bad, yeah. Having been all both sides of the desk, I know.

So: wich grownup's do you blame for you're shity litterasy?

Winston Churchill, by the way, was lauded for his ability to FUCKING SPEAK AND WRITE, whatever his thoughts on education. Not to mention, you know, running a country.

Before I buy even one cent worth of your argument that it's all the system's fault, you're going to have to show me that you -- or the apparently silent majority for whom you stand -- took the time to make up for

Given the topic on which he was writing, and his opinion on it, then why should we cut him any slack, when he is advocating the opposite? If he wants to write in passages English, condemning others' use of English, then shouldn't he hold himself to better standards?

I think I must have missed the part when he condemned others' use of English.

Either way, having less than stellar command of your second or third or fifth language, whichever English is for geekymachoman, is not necessarily a sign of a poor eduction. I'm fairly educated, but I'm a bit rusty in my second language. Even though I'm sure I could ask where the bathroom is, I doubt I could make an intelligible point in a forum of native speakers of that language.

Obviously, the same could be said about you and Geography. There are countries other than the US of A, you know.

But I expect you knew that. I also expect you knew that the parent was actually not a native speaker (like myself). The fact that you posted as AC makes me believe that you're most probably just some dickhead who gets off on pissing off other people.

I suppose yours taught you that it's OK that someone who studied hard and did the exam fairly gets a lower mark than a corrupt lazy cretin like you, and that you blag your way into a position that he probably deserved more than you?

The last sentence of the article is the most telling. Homework can be grueling especially when you need help at the elementary age and no one is there to help you. At $6 per question and with 20+ math problems to solve per night, I doubt this will be abused.

And even if abuse is wide spread, then all the more reason why in-school exams and quizzes are important. To gauge how well students are learning and how well the lessons are taught by educators. To much importance is placed on homework in many areas.

For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way. If you think about it, homework is what prepares your day to day job (though sometimes extreme deadlines begin to feel more like tests). I've been out of college for 2 years now and I've spent 99% of my work time doing what I would call homework, and about 1% doing what I would call tests.

My impression has been that, of those five you mention, most of them don't want homework to count more, they just want less of the test grade to be shoved into a single, high pressure exam. Having smaller, weekly quizzes or more in class projects reduces the odds that a single bad day in finals week wrecks your grade. It also reduces the tendency to only cram for the one test and not pay attention the rest of the semester.

I remember grade school homework as 90% busy work. Forcing students who already und

Just worth throwing out that I have yet to see a school which does not say that students should expect anything less than 3 hours of homework per class. Down here in florida schools tend to have 5 classes a day.

Either three states' worth of schools didn't do the math or schools genuinely expect students to spend 22 hours a day working, 7 in school and 15 outside of class.

For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way.

I have to say that I hated homework when I was a kid, thought it was pointless and stupid, but as an adult the experience has served me well in some ways. At work, I may be given an assignment like "Write a report on this subject and be ready to present it at a meeting that we're going to have 2 weeks from today." You have to be able to get something like that done without someone standing over your shoulder making sure you do it.

On the other hand, that's not to say that the homework assignments I had as

As I got older, I found it oppressive to think about how much work I was doing that was simply not useful to anyone

That was the most important lesson I learned in school. It's the primary reason I dropped out. Delivering pizza was far more fulfilling - people appreciate pizza. These days I stand out as a developer because I solve new problems, and focus on what will be useful to people. Not surprisingly, that pays far better than the repetitive busywork which seems to occupy 80% of coders these days.

I was in a program in high school where we did very menial scientific research for a local company. It was basically collecting data, plugging it to spreadsheets, and the teacher helped us to some very basic analysis. Our work may not have been helpful to anyone-- hell, they might have simply thrown it in the trash, but the idea that we were trying to come up with answers that someone else didn't already have was a outstanding experience.

There are things that "busy work" can teach, e.g. discipline, time management. Test skills, on the other hand, can be an exercise in analyzing the psychology of whoever made the tests. When I was in school, there were times when I scored 80% on a test without knowing any of the material I was being tested for.

My larger point here is that, even though "test skills" are skills, tests often don't actually test what they are designed to test. There is no silver bullet-- no magical method that lets you put a

And personally, I'd be rather wary of paying $100 for a presentation, since if you don't know the material it's going to be pretty obvious anyway. You'll be out a lot of cash, and still look like an idiot when you get asked a question.

So I'm all for it. The creator is right. They'll have to learn the material sooner or later, because nobody will be able to buy answers on exam day. He might as well make some easy money off of anyone gullible enough to do t

I heard a story on National Public Radio about a similar service (in English, for Americans). Some guy had published a tell-all essay about his days being one of the people who wrote papers for money. He said he usually did an honest job and wrote a quality paper, but most of the time, in his heart he knew that the English of the people paying for the service was so poor that any teacher who was even moderately paying attention would catch the cheaters. On some occasions, however, he'd have a bad experience

Homework should be used as a teaching tool, not as a measure of success. Homework tracks your progress through a chapter, and can be used to identify what areas of the material you need to study more. Tests should be the majority of the grade, since they are a measure of the final result of the learning...and material should be retested in smaller amounts later. Graded homework is too easy to BS. Getting someone else to do it, finding answers posted online, etc. With a heavier emphasis on tests, the benefit

I think grades as a whole are not a measure of success. For one, when I got bad grades in high school, it wasn't really that I wasn't trying, it was that I didn't click with my teacher. Some teachers I just understood, they could explain something once and I could ace every test on it, for others they could explain something for an entire semester and I still would not fully understand it. This happened most often in math, something I am admittedly not great at to this day (coding comes easy-ish to me, but

We regularly get homework questions asked (for payment) at uclue.com [uclue.com]. Most of the researchers don't like to answer homework questions, so we developed the following policy:

"We are delighted to assist customers with their homework. We can provide information, explanations, links and resources. We do not provide homework answers in finished form, such as essays or answers to tests."

Additionally, we have a clarification process so that we can discuss the homework with the customer and help to educate them. I

I urge anyone that's reading this and has children to look into the 'Montessori Method' of education. It's "development" based, rather than "memory / regurgitation" based. It uses knowledge to build the connections in the brain, rather than having the focus be on rote memorization of the knowledge itself.

In their Ted lecture [ted.com], the creators of Google mentioned that they incorporated Montessori's method into their company. If you study up on the method and how they run their company, you can see the simil

The point is, this kind of problem would never occur in a Montessori school, mainly because no homework is forced. The worksheet, fill-in-the-blank style homework, that this website circumvents, is extremely inefficient when thinking in terms of 'development'. And the low amount of brain activity while following the rigid instructions and mechanically filling in a few blanks is not at all conducive to long term memory either. Not when you compare it to anything like working with

It uses knowledge to build the connections in the brain, rather than having the focus be on rote memorization of the knowledge itself.

The only 'connections' that Faismesdevoirs develops are the kinds involving how to use your money and influence to get other people to do your job. This isn't an educational method (like Montessori is). It teaches people how to weasel out of doing actual work.

I don't mean connections as in 'ideas', I mean physical, neural connections in the brain. And you're right, this website doesn't help development. But neither do the worksheets. I wrote more about this here [slashdot.org].

A number of inner-city public schools in Milwaukee that were in trouble have converted to the Montessori method. A study was published in Science magazine [sciencemag.org] and gave promising results [montessori.org].

Maybe not in this century, but there are a number of Montessori schools all over the world, and it's growing.

I just wish it had a different name. Saying 'Montessori' to distinguish it from the traditional 'sit and listen to a lecture' style currently found in most public schools unfortunately makes it sound 'alternative' a

In all seriousness though, the goal should be to bring up the lower class to the higher level, not to lower the upper class to the lower level. They're not the same thing. While the overall value of money stays the same in economics, the actual, real-world worth is what we should focus on.

Think of the Jetsons, complaining that they're poor and can only afford that huge house and the older type robot housekeeper. Lowering the productivity of the upper class is not the same as raising the productivity of the lower class.

...that would be akin to the entire class of employers across the world volunteering to share their loot with the people they looted from!

You're conflating terms. If they're employers, they are creating jobs that help the economy. If they're "looting," they're thieves, and should be arrested. Please don't confuse the terms.

What's your plan, are you going to ask them nicely?!

No, I'm all in favor of arresting and punishing with force those who break the law.

Next you'll be telling me you didn't know capitalism was a system of exploitation and oppression!

Again, you're conflating terms. Capitalism is merely economic Darwinism, and while survival-of-the-fittest is a hard thing to grapple with, it's a necessary part of reality. To try to fight it, or to artificially prevent the evolution of tec

I wasn't addressing the bourgeoisie, but apparently you were. Yes, you are now being very clear.

Though as for mixing terms, you are now conflating profit and exploitation. Value is relative, and legal profit is a two-way street. If I am able to obtain food, but not water, and you are able to get water, but not food, we can exchange goods and both profit, neither having necessarily exploited the other. We have both profited, and I daresay are both much happier (and better off) for it. While slavers certa

Great. You're from the USA. I don't think a couple of slashdot replies can really penetrate your country's glorious myth making machine but i'll try anways!:) i will make it brief:

Yes, I was born in the States -- not all of my family was. I'd appreciate it if you talked to me as a person, and not to your prejudices of my race or my country.

Capital is a social product. Yet, the benefit of capitalism is private. Therein lies a contradiction.

Did you not read my post? I already countered this, explaining it as a logical fallacy -- I gave a clear example of how the benefits of capitalism can indeed be mutual ("social" as you said). But maybe you aren't listening to me, and are happy to continue spout your own opinion.

Products aren't produced because there is a clearly defined allocation of need, they are produced in the hopes of realising a profit. Therein lies a contradiction.